Today vs Yesterday
If you’re eyeing the benefits of a cloud-based contact center, keep in mind they’re not all created equal. A lousy architecture in a premises-based contact center is easy to replicate in the cloud. And there’s also the consideration of whether or not a system being touted as cloud is really cloud-based instead of a managed service out of a proprietary data center. Get ready to ask all the right questions before you make up your mind. Here are the essentials to consider when considering vendors and their architecture.
A Federated Approach: Sanity Check on Extensible Architecture
An acid test to determine if a solution is truly cloud-based is its ability to run in more than one cloud. That is to say, a well-conceived product should have the flexibility to run in Google, Azure, or Amazon for example. If there is no way that can ever be done with the “cloud-based” system you’re looking at — it could be that it’s not really cloud. If this can’t be done by your vendor, they’ve made one or more mistakes: 1) lack of agnosticism in their vision; and/or 2) their system runs in a proprietary data center.
Economy of Scale vs. Labor Arbitrage
The legacy model of IT teams spending untold hours nursing proprietary hardware and servers is quickly falling out of favor. Enterprises who have not made the switch to cloud-based solutions for their contact center infrastructure are still saddled with this legacy. But there’s a difference between a managed service – that is plopping all of your servers or equivalent in someone else’s’ data center vs. eliminating the need for the care and feeding of servers. With a true cloud approach, the cost of maintaining infrastructure is drastically reduced and the savings are passed on to the enterprise.
Adaptability and Scale: Room to Grow
No one wants to buy more than what they need. Such is the problem with buying lots of hardware when you can’t predict your growth accurately. For this reason, the purchase of proprietary behind-the-firewall gear is always done with much angst. Now imagine, not having to worry about how much hardware to buy or how many people to hire to keep it running. Imagine further being able to either expand or collapse your infrastructure based on dynamic need. All this without onerous capital equipment expense. This is but one benefit of migrating from premises-based solutions to the cloud.
The Game-Changer: Uptime
Many buyers of contact center infrastructure argue that there’s only one essential measurement and that is uptime. Who cares how scalable, adaptable, or inexpensive a solution is if it isn’t reliable? Today’s modern, cloud-based solutions have a leg up on legacy infrastructure. Notably, the ability to spawn multiple instances across geographically distributed “availability zones.” The bottom line is that it’s much easier and much less expensive to make cloud-based solutions resilient.
Your Benefit & Opportunity
Now that I’ve got your attention, let’s get to the heart of the matter. The promise of the cloud is all about scalability, reliability, portability, and redundancy. In essence, leveraging 2019 cloud technologies as part of a modern contact center solution architecture brings the promise of the cloud to customer care and enables enterprises of all sizes to offer a superior consumer experience that delights all.